Sorry, couldn’t find a picture of them doing this in the middle of the night.
It wasn’t a heavy snowstorm, we didn’t have high winds; but that didn’t stop a power outage from happening. Eleven o’clock at night, bam! no electricity.
That morning I noticed a couple of cherry-pickers working on the wires. It turns out they were from the phone company. I’ll bet they made some kind of mistake up there that came home to roost that night. Just try getting anyone to admit to it.
Well, it doesn’t take much, does it, to disrupt our modern way of life. Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before, just get off the grid. Sure, I want to make radical lifestyle changes in my seventies! Instant transformation, Lifelong Suburban to Mr. Mountain Man. What could possibly go wrong?
This sounds so familiar. We have every kind of problem you could ever imagine here in Idaho where things like this hardly ever happen. Water freezing in pipes, heavy snow, very wild winds, things breaking down (including all of my body parts) extreme cold- everything
going nuts. Hang in there everybody- hope to make it to spring – at least some of us.
I’ll be very much put out if everybody here doesn’t make it to the spring.
I can understand your frustration. Living in the countryside, outages are fairly routine. In fact, within the last week or two, we were off for hours, during a storm. We all are highly dependent upon electricity. Long term outages are very hard to deal with.
As hard as it may be to believe, the guy in the van was probably not guilty of anything more than being very bored. Electrical distribution systems get badly beat up by snow, and even well-maintained systems can experience outages. The distribution system is laid out, somewhat, in branches, like a tree. Various spurs are connected via fused connectors, which burn out if there is a fault in the line, which is highly preferable over having the line itself burn.
When an area is experiencing an outage, there will usually be some open fuses, which are visible from the ground, if you know what to look for. The repair crew will pull open any closed fuses, or open a switch, if there’s a nearby switch point, if it’s a three-phase line, and then everything downstream is considered safe. A man, or possibly a small crew, will be stationed at the site, to insure that those fuses and/or switches are not closed until it is verified that no one is working on those lines. That’s a life or death matter, for the linemen.
Then comes the fun part; finding the fault. At night, in the middle of a snowstorm, finding a downed line, or a branch which is fouling a line is no easy matter, and just because you find one fault, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other faults, and that’s one reason that lights will blink back on for a few seconds, and then the fuses will blow again. All of this time, and it can go on for hours, there will be people stationed at strategic places on the system, monitoring the radio and waiting to open or close a switch when the call comes.
In the meantime, the guys are bored. I used to know a lineman, and I got to ride along during a long night of outages, during a snowstorm. It was quite enjoyable, but I wasn’t allowed anywhere near any lines or equipment. I was a spectator, only.
There were several crews out that night, keeping in touch by radio, and a lot of people working. The spirit was towards getting the outage under control. These guys had worked all day, got called out about supper time, and would be back at work the next morning. No one was dogging it. But I could completely understand how someone could doze off while guarding a switch or fuse bank. I promise you, had a radio call come his direction, he would have been back to work instantly.
A few years after this ride, I remember driving past another lineman from the same company, midday, sitting in his truck, reading a newspaper. I actually recognized him. It looked like he was goofing off, but he was manning a switch, and waiting for a radio call. I can’t blame him for reading the paper, he probably spent many hours there.
I didn’t mean to blast the guy. I was just puzzled that he seemed to be the only one there at the time. The maintenance trucks were there… but where was the crew?
It is strange, but as I learned in my ride-along, there’s a lot more to it than we might think. When working with distribution systems that operate in the thousands of volts, there’s a lot of choreography involved, and it could be that they packed off into other trucks. Linemen frequently use one vehicle per worker for flexibility, but they may have paired up, once on site, and dispersed. Clearing a storm outage involves a lot of searching, so an extra pair of eyes can come in handy.
The famous quote applies here: “It’s good enough for government work.”